The Library of Holland House Library, Kensington, London, after air raid, 1940. Photographer unknown. It's in A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic at The Polygon Gallery to April 28.PNG

Curated by David Campany, A Handful of Dust explores the influence of an iconic 1920 image attributed to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp

The organizing image in the exhibition at The Polygon Gallery is as wide as my outstretched arms. It’s by Man Ray of a dust-covered pane of glass in the studio of Marcel Duchamp. Its size gives it a presence on the wall. At the angle it’s taken, the surface looks like it’s covered in numerous dust bunnies that could, with a little imagination, double as bales of hay in a farmer’s field. It also has geometric shapes – lines, ovals, curves – because the pane was photographed at an intermediary stage of becoming The Large Glass, considered one of Duchamp major works. The shapes reminded me of the Nazca Lines in Peru. It’s an image that flickers between small and big.

The original photo is called Dust Breeding. Curator David Campany follows the image from 1920 when it was taken through 20th century art history in A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic. Photography, it turns out has been instrumental in helping people see dust in a way that probably wouldn’t have been possible without the all-seeing eye of the camera.

What happened is that I had a completely different experience of the exhibition. Instead of the celebrated image interesting me, I got sidetracked by one of the lesser known photographs.

It’s a gelatin silver print of The Library of Holland House Library, Kensington, London, after air raid, 1940 (shown above). The caption says that the photographer is unknown. It looks like it could be the kind of photograph meant to illustrate the effects of German bombing on London. But there’s no indication it was ever published in a newspaper. It’s apparently a fairly well known image in the United Kingdom although I’ve never seen it before.

I love the way it depicts three men in hats looking, touching and holding books in a library where the roof has collapsed. Above is grey sky instead of a ceiling. The charred beams of the ceiling have fallen to create a triangle shape in the middle with the apex pointing down into the rubble.

Its such an absurd images it looks like something right out of Monty Python. I imagined it as a variation of the Dead Parrot Sketch. In this case, one or all of the men might say: “There’s no roof? What do you mean there’s no roof? It’s just a big airy in here, that’s all.”

In the gallery, it’s really a small photograph, barely wider than the fingers of my outstretched hand. It’s also turning slightly yellow with age. While it tries to hold its own in the exhibition, it really is dwarfed by the square footage of the wall it’s hanging on and the volume of the room it’s in. To me, however, it feels much bigger than it looks.

The photograph doesn’t have a didactic panel adding more context. It’s included in the catalogue as an image but it doesn’t receive any attention from the text. It’s next to a photograph of a dust-covered car that carried Italian dictator Benito Mussolini when he was discovered by partisans and executed. From where its placed in the exhibition, I took the photograph of the bombed library as an example of the kind of dust, ash, and general destruction produced by war.

Did the photographer walk along the street, see the destruction, then hire actors to pose? Or some friends? Or is it a wonderful example of on the spot street photography? Does it matter? Only if you think, as I did initially, that it’s an example of documentary journalism.

Notes on Hydraulic Fracturing: The Desolate North-East, 1, 2 and 3, chromogenic print, by Louise Oates, in A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic.PNG

Another image looks like a visual rhyme with the Man Ray-Duchamp photograph.

The grainy work is by Sophie Ristelhueber who was very much aware of Dust Breeding when she took hers later in the 20th century. She was working on a series of photographs of Kuwait after the First Gulf War when she decided to elevate her view of the landscape. Her black and white image from the 1992 series Fait (Fact) flickers between a dusty pane of glass and an aerial photograph. (If it had been in colour – which is generally absent missing in most of the works in the exhibition – I doubt it would have worked nearly as well.)

“The constant shift between the infinitely big and the infinitely small may disorient the spectator,” Ristelhueber is quoted as saying on the didactic panel.

“But it is a good illustration of our relationship to the world: we have at our disposal modern techniques of seeing everything, apprehending everything: yet we see nothing.”

In the last exhibition area there’s a wonderful seven-minute video and sound installation. It’s called Murmur by Kirk Palmer.

From darkness, light articulates a forest that’s so lush and thick you can’t see the ground. As the forest wakens for the day, it’s accompanied by a soundscape that made me think of wind rustling through leaves and a great lumbering machine rolling into place.

As the sound builds, the trees wave back and forth. I felt as if a powerful outside force was about to invade this beautiful landscape. Were aliens landing the mother ship nearby? Or was it just a bunch of humans moving in industrial machinery to start logging another forest? While the powerful force never materializes, it makes its presence felt.

The trees reach a point when they’re swaying so violently they look like they could snap at any moment.

Then silence. But the trees don’t stop. They keep moving like they’re in shock from what they’ve just experienced.

Afterwards, I found out that the video shows a forest of bamboo trees outside Kyoto. When the artist made the video, he was very much aware that Kyoto was shortlisted to get nuked during the Second World War. But after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Kyoto was removed at the last minute because of its cultural importance. Instead, the Americans dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. Murmur is open ended enough to make me think of both those specific incidents and the powerful forces of history that by-passed Kyoto.

Murmur, still from video and sound installation, by Kirk Palmer, site-specific adaptation, in A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic.PNG

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